Gramercy Park

Gramercy Park is a very quiet, very nice, and very exclusive part of Manhattan. It is, of course, part of the Gramercy neighborhood that starts somewhere around 34th Street and goes down to somewhere around 14th Street. It’s on the east side of Manhattan.

Gramercy Park is a little different that other parks in Manhattan. No. Make that “Gramercy Park is a whole lot different than other parks in Manhattan”.

It’s exclusive. You have to live in the immediate neighborhood of the park to get a key to the place. For the rest of us, it just sort of sits there and mocks us as unworthy to enter.

It’s located around 22nd and Lexington Avenue. It interrupts the flow of traffic, but that’s okay: it’s Gramercy Park.

A couple of years ago, I looked pretty closely at buying a place in the Gramercy neighborhood and their big selling point was that it came with a key to the park. It’s a very nice park, but don’t confuse it with the big ones. It’s pretty small. The defining characteristic of it, aside from keeping out the riff-raff like me, is that it is very neat and clean and ordered.

It really goes east to west. Here’s a shot from the west.

It was a cold Saturday, and there was absolutely no one in the park. Right in the middle of Manhattan and not a single soul was walking it. There were a few of us wandering the outside perimeter…probably mostly wishing to go into a warm building rather than a cold park. ‘Cept for me, of course.

In the center of the park is a statue that I really don’t understand. I’m a bit of a history buff but I wouldn’t have put this person on my list of “center statue of Manhattan’s most exclusive park” within the top 2,000 or so. I certainly knew his name, but…why on earth is he there?

Here’s his picture.

Yep, it’s Edwin Booth, older brother of John Wilkes Booth (you ought to know that name without a Wikipedia link).

He seems to be in his Hamlet costume, for which he was famed. And we thought these were the days of celebrity worship.